In addition to the extraction problem, the IT professional is facing an ever increasing data reservoir, due to proliferation of computer technology throughout every industry, lowered cost and footprint of mass storage and increasing demand for organized information as computer users grow more and more comfortable with computer technology.

Knowledge workers in an organization are demanding complex information from different departments. Dealing with enormous amount of data requires the creation and management of a Data Warehouse.

COLD Data Warehouse Manager is a specialized database, modeled for use by decision support and other business analysis software products. Data warehousing consists of a combination of multiple steps that allows collection, cleansing, organizing and evaluation of data. Most data warehouses are implemented with dimensional data models. Dimensional data models categorize the data in a multi-dimension matrix.

IMAGE-X's COLD Miner allows creation of a data warehouse using computer output data, thus eliminating the complex and costly data warehouse methodology that is typically being advocated at present. Data can be extracted without the need for clean-up if the data is already formatted by the current application to generate a print output. The print output can be considered as clean data for any warehousing purposes. The computer output data can not be imported in a data warehouse database easily, since the data is not formatted. Storage of the computer output data takes less space and can be accomplished on any storage medium including the low cost optical storage.

The major advantage is that creating computer output is a routine process for any organization. Secondly the output can be generated by an array of systems using different database engines. The addition of any new report does not require additional programming efforts. A number of organizations are already creating these reports for storage on microfilm or optical media.

Once the data is formatted in this fashion, then a slice of data can be isolated rather easily by down loading the data from the computer output repository to COLD Miner, a decision support system tool. IMAGE-X's COLD Miner also allows exporting of the data from COLD Miner to desktop tools such as spreadsheet programs that can be used to format the data for a graphical representation.

COLD Data Warehouse Manager gives corporations the competitive advantage of a data warehouse without the high cost required for traditional solutions.